Writing Democracy: The Political Turn in and Beyond the Trump Era
Edited with Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, and Jessica Pauszek.
Edited with Shannon Carter, Deborah Mutnick, and Jessica Pauszek.
Article published in The Atlantic, found here.
Edited with Gary W. Gallagher
An Exhibit in the Special Collections Library
Professor Kate Kostelnik's course "Tutoring Writing Across Cultures" was featured in UVA Today. Follow this link for the full article.
Today
Poetry’s “Ancient Liberties”: A Mirror for Magistrates and the Resources of ComplaintABSTRACT“To be heard as complaining is not to be heard,” writes Sara Ahmed. Though Ahmed’s focus on twenty-first century institutional abuses and strategies might seem remote from early modern poetry, her observation chimes with familiar criticisms of the poetic mode termed complaint, frequently maligned for its supposed solipsism and inefficacy. While populating a vast, generically and formally diverse terrain, early modern complaints often issue from the brink (or from the beyond), as characters and lyric personae bemoan catastrophes or seek to forge their own memorials. The dissertation project In Tragedy’s Shadow: Complaint and English Early Modern Poetry seeks to recall complaint from the margins, exploring its rhetorical and philosophical underpinnings to reveal the mode’s deep entanglement with and impact on more critically exalted genres. It locates the questions, conventions, and strategies of complaint in tragedy, via a connection with exemplarity in didactic verse history; in satire and elegy, via the vernacular tradition of de casibus tragedy; and in the deep structures of sonnet sequences. This presentation, adapted from a chapter-in-progress on William Baldwin and tragedy, explores complaint’s productive potential by attending to the earliest editions of A Mirror for Magistrates (1559; 2nd edition 1563), one of the most important prosimetric texts of the English early modern period. Part of the so-called de casibus tradition, and a significant influence on dramatic tragedy, the Mirror is comprised of verse narratives describing the downfalls of bad kings and office holders. Highlighting complaints from the first and second editions of the Mirror, this presentation investigates how the work’s reliance on first-person voicing of historical figures’ downfalls and its recapitulation of moral precepts taken from older de casibus texts function to destabilize historical authority, testifying to poetry’s power to rethink authority within the present. Ultimately, the Mirror draws subtle and disturbing parallels between poets and their deviant historical subjects, foregrounding a new account of what it terms poetry’s “ancient liberties” and suggesting the recuperative power of complaint as a mode.
April Charlottesville Reading Series event, featuring MFA alumna Raisa Tolchinsky and CW professor Kevin Moffett.
Sunday, April 28th
Emeritus Professor Chris Tilghman reads from his new novel, On the Tobacco Coast
Wednesday, May 1st
Thursday, May 2nd
Friday, May 3rd